On Jan. 28 the hacker group Cyber Berkut published a collection of documents taken from the computer of Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios. The papers contain information about catastrophic situation inside the Ukrainian armed forces, such as extremely low morale, arms smuggling, and attempts by Ukrainian commanders to force their soldiers to fight the pro-Russian militia.
The document confirms that in battles in the Donbass the Ukrainian armed forces actually lost tens or hundreds of times more men than stated in the officially released figures. Ukrainian officials and operation commanders persist in denying this undeniable fact, although in the Dnipropetrovsk region bordering Novorossia they are busy expanding the existing cemetery, and the administration of the president of Ukraine is preparing to allocate at least another 80 hectares of formerly agricultural land to make room for fresh graves. (Interestingly, this amount of space will accommodate approximately 260,000 graves, a number that suspiciously matches the number of soldiers and officers that Ukrainian officials plan to call up during the next mobilization).
In this context it is no wonder that the Ukrainian mobilization is running aground. According toinformation provided by Yuriy Biryukov, an adviser to Poroshenko, the situation is most dire in western Ukraine, where men who receive draft notices flee the country en masse, and local authorities oblige the fugitives by providing them with transportation and establishing new bus routes to take them abroad. Thus, in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, 37% of the men who have received their conscription notices have decamped for foreign destinations.
Paradoxically, many are fleeing to Russia, which, if one believes the claims of President Poroshenko, the Ukrainian ministers, and parliament, is the “aggressor state.”